What I mean is someone sets up a new community, blasts it with a bunch of content to get things started, or sets up a new community bot that makes 20 posts and every other post in my feed is that community. Usually with 1 or 2 votes each and no comments. No matter what way I sort I see this.
I have zero issues with people getting things going within their space, and it’s not a knock against new communities that don’t want to be empty when people stumble across them.
It’s a complaint about the algorithm flooding my feed with so much content from one place that I’ve unfortunately blocked communities over this that I otherwise would have continued to run across and maybe engaged with in the future.
I’m not sure if your first X results should all be unique communities or putting some sort of engagement threshold in place before they show up in the top X posts or something. I don’t really have a perfect answer but to me this is a flaw in the system.
The “New Comments” sort is actually supposed to be like old school forums, where a new post would be at the top and then each comment would “bump” the post to the top again. It works the exact same way. Although a way to sort by “New Comments” with at least 1 comment would be an interesting option, just need better names for these things lol. But then again if everyone uses that then who will be the first one to comment on any post?
https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/03-votes-and-ranking.html
That might be a fitting description of the current behaviour, yes. But the doc you linked only mentions the last part. It does not specify wether new posts with no comments are sorted top or bottom. I expected it to sort them bottom, since a post with no comments has no “New Comments”.
Yes, but not everyone uses that. I switch between different sorting types. Sometimes I am the first to comment.
it’s not spelled out clearly, but it does say “analogous to the sorting of traditional forums”, they could make that doc more clear (maybe you could take a shot at improving the phrasing? https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-docs/blob/main/src/users/03-votes-and-ranking.md )